This timelapse video was made from images taken by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst orbiting Earth on the International Space Station.

The video is offered in Ultra High Definition, the highest available to consumers. Be sure to change the settings in YouTube if your computer or television can handle it for the full effect.

The montage is made from a long sequence of still photographs taken at a resolution of 4256 x 2832 pixels at a rate of one every second. The high resolution allowed the ESA production team to create a 3840 x 2160 pixel movie, also known as Ultra HD or 4K.

Playing these sequences at 25 frames per second, the film runs 25 times faster than it looks for the astronauts in space.

The artistic effects of the light trails from stars and cities at night are created by superimposing the individual images and fading them out slowly.

Alexander Gerst is a member of the International Space Station Expedition 40 crew. He is spending five and a half months living and working on the ISS for his Blue Dot mission.

We are seeing great adoption of Silverlight for premium media solutions. In the last few months we’ve seen companies like Canal+, TV2, and Maximum TV launch both live and on-demand Silverlight solutions.

Silverlight 5 will enable media experiences to go even further by adding:

•Hardware video decode: Silverlight 5 now supports GPU accelerated video decode, which significantly reduces CPU load for HD video. Using Silverlight 5, even low powered Netbooks will be able to play back 1080p HD content

•Trickplay: Silverlight 5 now enables variable speed playback of media content on the client with automatic audio pitch correction. This is great for training videos where you want to speed up the trainer while still understanding what he’s saying

•Improved power awareness will prevent screensavers from kicking in while you’re watching movies while allowing the computer to sleep when video is not playing.

•Remote-control support is now built-into Silverlight 5 - allowing users to control media playback with remote control devices.

Application Development

Silverlight provides a rich application development environment that enables you to build great web delivered applications.

•Databinding and MVVM: Silverlight 5 delivers significant data-binding improvements that improve developer productivity and provide better Silverlight/WPF feature convergence. Developers can now debug data-binding expressions, set breakpoints on bindings, and more easily determine errors. Implicit DataTemplates now allow templates to be created across an application to support a particular type by default. Ancestor RelativeSource bindings makes it easier for a DataTemplate to bind to a property on a container control. Binding in style setters allows bindings to be used within styles to reference other properties. And a new DataContextChanged event is being introduced to make handling changes easier. Markup extensions are also now support and allow code to be run at XAML parse time for both properties and event handlers, enabling cutting-edge MVVM support.

•Text and Printing: Silverlight 5 delivers improved text clarity that enables crisper and cleaner text rendering, multi-column text flow and linked text containers, character and leading support, and full OpenType font support. Silverlight 5 also includes a new Postscript Vector Printing API that provides programmatic control over what you print, and enables printing richer reports and documents. Pivot functionality – which enables developers to build amazing information visualization experiences – will also be provided built-into the Silverlight 5 SDK.

•Graphics: Silverlight 5 includes immediate mode graphics support that enables developers to take full advantage of the GPU (graphics processing unit) and enables accelerated 3-D graphics support. This new support facilitates much richer data visualization scenarios (make sure to watch the keynote to see some really eye-popping ones).

•Out of Browser: Silverlight 5 builds on the out-of-browser capabilities we introduced with Silverlight 5. Out of browser applications can now create and manage child windows. Trusted out of browser applications can now also use P/Invoke capabilities to call unmanaged libraries and Win32 APIs. Enhanced group policy support enables enterprises to both lock down and open up security sandbox capabilities of Silverlight 5 applications.

•Testing Tools: We are adding automated UI testing support for Silverlight applications with Visual Studio 2010. This makes it easy to test Silverlight applications, and automate the functionality of them.